Hi All, The BLUG would like to wish you all a great Dragon Boat Festival! As most people will be on vacation this week, we will not have a monthly meeting this Tuesday. Stay tuned for further announcements and have a fantastic holiday!

The newly Hong Kong registered charity (charity status pending approval) Digital Freedom Foundation (formerly known as SFI) is proud to announce the launch of Hardware Freedom Day on April 20, 2013. Focusing a lot on all the hackerspaces around the world, but not only, HFD aims to spread the word about Open Source Hardware in our local communities and encourage more people to explore the limitless opportunities of sharing creativity, hacking skills and knowledge. Tightly connected with Free Software, HFD celebration comes as a great complement with the very famous Software Freedom Day celebration which has been running since 2004.

Hardware hacking is definitely not unknown to the BLUG who has been pioneering with their quadcopter, the open drone group and the many monthly meetings showcasing exciting projects.

So if you're into Open Source Hardware don't wait, go create your wiki page and register your event right now!

As time certainly flies and the year of the Dragon is now behind us all, the BLUG would like to wish all its members a happy Chinese new year for the year of the Snake! We hope that all of you are having a fantastic time with your families or just enjoying the less but still crowded Beijing at this time of the year. To accommodate our members busy schedules, we have also decided to postpone our monthly meetings by one week so that we will have our monthly meeting on the 19th and coding for fun on the 23rd.

• BLUG monthly meeting: 2013, February 19th (third Tuesday of the month)
• Coding for fun: 2013, February 23rd (third Saturday of the month)

Again, let us wish you all a very happy new year, 蛇年大吉，万事如意！

Well that was a great party! First our thanks go to Happylatte for hosting us, the organization team to set up a great party under a lot of constraints and all the generous donators who have permitted us to fund all of the food and drinks!
It was a great celebration for the 10 years of the BLUG, 10 years of constant promotion of software freedom and now, more and more, hardware freedom and related DYI culture. 109 BLUGers and friends had registered for the party which is almost 30 more than our previous record from 2006. We had 27 pizzas, lost count of the number of chuanr after the fourth delivery and our home-brewed beer cooked up by our veteran member Barcode was gone in not time! We surely hope that you have enjoyed what was on the program and should you have any interest in getting more familiar with either of the topics, here is a summary of what we have shown and where you can learn more:

• The two arcade stations where both powered by XBMC, a great open source solution to use as a home media center.
• Frets on Fire, the guitar game that we had in the canteen is also available in XBMC but can also be installed on your GNU/Linux system. For Debian based users the package is called fretsonfire. You may have noticed that we had our own almost playable Arduino based guitar, this is work from our members from the Open-Drone group.
• On the same TV, we also played the latest movie from the Blender Foundation: Tears of Steel. Get your free copy directly from the Blender.org website.
• Have you noticed that weird dual-octave keyboard-like music instrument on the table of the reception? The one that produces sound from ancient floppy drives? This is the work from the Hardchord group. Check their website out for more details.
• In the very same area, we also had a couple of wifi cars from the people of Open-Drone. Did you know that they meet every Thursdays to play with hardware?
• Last but not least, the slides from Peter's great birthday speech are now available for download here!

If you have been joining our meetings in the last few weeks then yesterday was probably not the first time you heard about Hardchord but the presentation given by project founder Derrick in our October meeting is a good chance to mention it on the BLUG website.

Hardchord is a project to create open hardware MIDI-compatible devices powered by Arduino microcontrollers. The primary focus is generating controlled tones using motorized devices and sound generators from the dawn of the digital era.
The project began on August 31, 2012 with the breadboarding of several Yamaha chips and the purchase of a half-dozen Sony floppy drives at a second-hand computer market by the west gate of Peking University.
Project members will be thoroughly documenting all chips and devices we use and writing modularized code that you can easily adapt for your own projects.

The above text was taken and slightly rephrased from the project about page, visit the website to learn more about it or check the slides that Derrick showed during the meeting